Who defends our right to free speech? Alan Kors, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), argues for free speech, individual liberty, religious freedom, rights of conscience, legal equality, due process and academic freedom on all college campuses. In his lecture, Kors will describe how American students at the dawn of the 21st century are victims of a generational swindle of epic proportions. On campus after campus, students of the sixties, now in power, have moved from free speech movements to speech codes. Kors believes they have also moved from racial integration to racial separatism, from treating students as young adults to treating students as children, and from struggles against mandatory chapel to struggles for mandatory sensitivity training on issues of "diversity." Tackling the tough questions of how and why our rights have changed, Kors will also address the costs of losing our liberty.

Professor Alan Charles Kors has been teaching European intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania since 1968. He earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. Coauthor of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (1998), he has received two awards for distinguished college teaching, and also served as editor-in-chief of the recently published Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (4 volumes, 2002). Additional publications include Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History (1990); D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (1976); and Atheism in France, 1650-1729: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (1990). The Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar for 2003-2004, Professor Kors lecture is sponsored by Tau chapter of the honor society.